Chapter 4

Billy got up early. As he plunged into his cold bath he envied his room-mate, who could remain at rest indefinitely, while his own hard lot was hurrying him to prayers and breakfast and Oscar’s inexorable notes. He sighed once more as he looked at the beauty of the new morning and felt its air upon his cheeks. He and Bertie belonged to the same club-table, and they met there mournfully over the oatmeal. This very hour to-morrow would see them eating their last before the examination in Philosophy 4. And nothing pleasant was going to happen between, —nothing that they could dwell upon with the slightest satisfaction. Nor had their sleep entirely refreshed them. Their eyes were not quite right, and their hair, though it was brushed, showed fatigue of the nerves in a certain inclination to limpness and disorder.

“Epicharmos of Kos
Was covered with moss,”
remarked Billy.

“Thales and Zeno
Were duffers at keno,”
added Bertie.

In the hours of trial they would often express their education thus.

“Philosophers I have met,” murmured Billy, with scorn And they ate silently for some time.

“There’s one thing that’s valuable,” said Bertie next. “When they spring those tricks on you about the flying arrow not moving, and all the rest, and prove it all right by logic, you learn what pure logic amounts to when it cuts loose from common sense. And Oscar thinks it’s immense. We shocked him.”

“He’s found the Bird-in-Hand!” cried Billy, quite suddenly.

“Oscar?” said Bertie, with an equal shout.

“No, John. John has. Came home last night and waked me up and told me.”

“Good for John,” remarked Bertie, pensively.

Now, to the undergraduate mind of that day the Bird-in-Hand tavern was what the golden fleece used to be to the Greeks, —a sort of shining, remote, miraculous thing, difficult though not impossible to find, for which expeditions were fitted out. It was reported to be somewhere in the direction of Quincy, and in one respect it resembled a ghost: you never saw a man who had seen it himself; it was always his cousin, or his elder brother in ‘79. But for the successful explorer a dinner and wines were waiting at the Bird-in-Hand more delicious than anything outside of Paradise. You will realize, therefore, what a thing it was to have a room-mate who had attained. If Billy had not been so dog-tired last night, he would have sat up and made John tell him everything from beginning to end.

“Soft-shell crabs, broiled live lobster, salmon, grass-plover, dough-birds, and rum omelette,” he was now reciting to Bertie.

“They say the rum there is old Jamaica brought in slave-ships,” said Bertie, reverently.

“I’ve heard he has white port of 1820,” said Billy; “and claret and champagne.”

Bertie looked out of the window. “This is the finest day there’s been,” said he. Then he looked at his watch. It was twenty-five minutes before Oscar. Then he looked Billy hard in the eye. “Have you any sand?” he inquired.

It was a challenge to Billy’s manhood. “Sand!” he yelled, sitting up.

Both of them in an instant had left the table and bounded out of the house. “I’ll meet you at Pike’s,” said Billy to Bertie. “Make him give us the black gelding.”

“Might as well bring our notes along,” Bertie called after his rushing friend; “and get John to tell you the road.”

To see their haste, as the two fled in opposite directions upon their errands, you would have supposed them under some crying call of obligation, or else to be escaping from justice.

Twenty minutes later they were seated behind the black gelding and bound on their journey in search of the bird-in-Hand. Their notes in Philosophy 4 were stowed under the buggy-seat.

“Did Oscar see you?” Bertie inquired.

“Not he,” cried Billy, joyously.

“Oscar will wonder,” said Bertie; and he gave the black gelding a triumphant touch with the whip.

You see, it was Oscar that had made them run go; or, rather, it was Duty and Fate walking in Oscar’s displeasing likeness. Nothing easier, nothing more reasonable, than to see the tutor and tell him they should not need him to-day. But that would have spoiled everything. They did not know it, but deep in their childlike hearts was a delicious sense that in thus unaccountably disappearing they had won a great game, had got away ahead of Duty and Fate. After all it did bear some resemblance to an escape from justice...

Could he have known this, Oscar would have felt more superior than ever. Punctually at the hour agreed, ten o’clock he rapped at Billy’s door and stood waiting, his leather wallet of notes nipped safe between elbow and ribs. Then he knocked again. Then he tried the door, and as it was open, he walked deferentially into the sitting room. Sonorous snores came from one of the bedrooms. Oscar peered in and saw John; but he saw no Billy in the other bed. Then, always deferential, he sat down in the sitting room and watched a couple of prettily striped coats hanging in a half-open closet.

At that moment the black gelding was flirtatiously crossing the drawbridge over the Charles on the Allston Road. The gelding knew the clank of those suspending chains and the slight unsteadiness of the meeting halves of the bridge as well as it knew oats. But it could not enjoy its own entirely premeditated surprise quite so much as Bertie and Billy were enjoying their entirely unpremeditated flight from Oscar. The wind rippled on the water; down at the boat-house Smith was helping some one embark in a single scull; they saw the green meadows toward Brighton; their foreheads felt cool and unvexed, and each new minute had the savor of fresh forbidden fruit.

“How do we go?” said Bertie.

“I forgot I had a bet with John until I had waked him,” said Billy. “He bet me five last night I couldn’t find it, and I took him. Of course, after that I had no right to ask him anything, and he thought I was funny. He said I couldn’t find out if the landlady’s hair was her own. I went him another five on that.”

“How do you say we ought to go?” said Bertie, presently.

“Quincy, I’m sure.”

They were now crossing the Albany tracks at Allston. “We’re going to get there,” said Bertie; and he turned the black gelding toward Brookline and Jamaica Plain.

The enchanting day surrounded them. The suburban houses, even the suburban street-cars, seemed part of one great universal plan of enjoyment. Pleasantness so radiated from the boys’ faces and from their general appearance of clean white flannel trousers and soft clean shirts of pink and blue that a driver on a passing car leaned to look after them with a smile and a butcher hailed them with loud brotherhood from his cart. They turned a corner, and from a long way off came the sight of the tower of Memorial Hall. Plain above all intervening tenements and foliage it rose. Over there beneath its shadow were examinations and Oscar. It caught Billy’s roving eye, and he nudged Bertie, pointing silently to it. “Ha, ha!” sang Bertie. And beneath his light whip the gelding sprang forward into its stride.

The clocks of Massachusetts struck eleven. Oscar rose doubtfully from his chair in Billy’s study. Again he looked into Billy’s bedroom and at the empty bed. Then he went for a moment and watched the still forcibly sleeping John. He turned his eyes this way and that, and after standing for a while moved quietly back to his chair and sat down with the leather wallet of notes on his lap, his knees together, and his unblocked shoes touching. In due time the clocks of Massachusetts struck noon.

In a meadow where a brown amber stream ran, lay Bertie and Billy on the grass. Their summer coats were off, their belts loosened. They watched with eyes half closed the long water-weeds moving gently as the current waved and twined them. The black gelding, brought along a farm road and through a gate, waited at its ease in the field beside a stone wall. Now and then it stretched and cropped a young leaf from a vine that grew over the wall, and now and then the want wind brought down the fruit blossoms all over the meadow. They fell from the tree where Bertie and Billy lay, and the boys brushed them from their faces. Not very far away was Blue Hill, softly shining; and crows high up in the air came from it occasionally across here.

By one o’clock a change had come in Billy’s room. Oscar during that hour had opened his satchel of philosophy upon his lap and read his notes attentively. Being almost word perfect in many parts of them, he now spent his unexpected leisure in acquiring accurately the language of still further paragraphs. “The sharp line of demarcation which Descartes drew between consciousness and the material world,” whispered Oscar with satisfaction, and knew that if Descartes were on the examination paper he could start with this and go on for nearly twenty lines before he would have to use any words of his own. As he memorized, the chambermaid, who had come to do the bedrooms three times already and had gone away again, now returned and no longer restrained her indignation. “Get up Mr. Blake!” she vociferated to the sleeping John; “you ought to be ashamed!” And she shook the bedstead. Thus John had come to rise and discover Oscar. The patient tutor explained himself as John listened in his pyjamas.